Winslow Wheeler: USAF Still Trying to Kill the A-10 — Absent Intelligence with Integrity, They Will Get Away With This Idiocy

Soon to be at the Harper’s website, at http://harpers.org/, is the attached article by Andrew Cockburn. “Tunnel Vision: Will the Air Force Kill Its Most Effective Weapon?” is sure to generate howls of protest from officialdom in the Air Force and its mouthpieces.

The article makes numerous important, indeed key, points. They involve not just the unique capabilities of the supposedly too old, too slow, too primitive and too cheap A-10, but also about the real limitations of wonder weapon technologies that have a strong appeal to those who don’t bother to look beyond the glitz and the many that have a material and dogmatic vested interest in them.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Please pay close attention to the incident that Cockburn, a friend and colleague, uses to open the article–and to the denouement of the incident related at the end. Also, central to the article is the destruction of the notions that the F-35 will ever be able to perform the close air support mission of the A-10 or that the Air Force’s leadership cares about that in the slightest.

I urge you to read the attached Harper’s article by Cockburn; I believe it makes important fundamental points about our national defense, not just the A-10.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a different, and also important, A-10 article, written by journalist Dion Nissembaum; note the point made at the end by an Air Force general: the A-10 is the best at doing what it does, but the Air Force chooses not to retain that capability. Clearly, there is a need to change that decision, one way or another.

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government does not make decisions on the basis of intelligence with integrity (ethical evidence-based decision-support) in part because partisan pork cannot stand the scrutiny, and in part because the US intelligence community leadership refuses to rise to the moral and intellectual mandate inherent in their Constitutionally-rooted authorities.